School as a Laboratory of Modern Life: On the Reform of Art Education in Central Europe, 1900-1945 (2020) [EN, SK, DE]

Proceedings from the international symposium School as a Laboratory of Modern Life held on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava and the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Bauhaus, organised by the Slovak Design Center at the Goethe-Institut in Bratislava in September 2019.

Contributors: Katalin Bakos, Simona Bérešová, Meghan Forbes, Lada Hubatová-Vacková, Vít Jakubíček, Alena Kavčáková, Alexandra Panzert, Klára Prešnajderová, Sonia de Puineuf, Mária Rišková, Grit Weber, Patrick Werkner, Cornelia Wieg, Julia Witt.

Edited by Simona Bérešová, Klára Prešnajderová, and Sonia de Puineuf
Publisher Slovak Design Center, Bratislava, September 2020
Open access
ISBN 9788089992065
277 pages

Symposium
Publisher

PDF, PDF (20 MB)
PDF (Slovak-only edition, no images, 1 MB)

John Beck, Ryan Bishop: Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde (2020)

“In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopian social order based on collective experimentation. In examining these projects’ promises and pitfalls and how they have inspired a new generation of collaborative labs populated by artists, engineers, and scientists, Beck and Bishop reveal the connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2020
Cultural Politics series
ISBN 9781478005957, 1478005955
viii+229 pages

Review: Lindsay Caplan (Art in America, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (updated on 2022-1-16)

Siegfried Ebeling: Der Raum als Membran (1926–) [German]

“Time and again Der Raum als Membran [Space as Membrane], published by Siegfried Ebeling as a kind of pamphlet in 1926 in Dessau — the artistic and technological laboratory of modernism—, caught the attention of his contemporaries. We find a copy on the desk of Walter Gropius at the Dessau Bauhaus, another one with notes from the hand of the architect at the library of Mies van der Rohe. And again and again whenever the utopian Bauhaus is mentioned, the title page of Der Raum als Membran reappears. The author, however, along with his other attempts to develop a theory of biological architecture, has disappeared from common memory. Siegfried Ebeling died 1963 in Hamburg, impoverished and isolated from post-war architecture.”

Full title: Der Raum als Membran: ist ein analytisch-kritischer Beitrag zu Fragen zukünftiger Architektur, die über das nackte Bedürfnis hinausgeht und hiermit sich legen möchte in die gestaltende Hand aller Wissenschaft.

First published by C. Dünnhaupt, Dessau, 1926.

New edition
Afterword by Walter Scheiffele
Publisher Spector Books, Leipzig, 2016
Edition Bauhaus, 43
ISBN 9783944669465, 3944669460
47 pages
via Thebaus

Commentary: Walter Scheiffele (2010), Volker Frank (n.d., DE), Luis Palcorbo & Ines Martin-Robles (RA, 2014, ES), James Lowder (2015), Matina Kousidi (Architectural Review, 2015), Matina Kousidi (MD Journal, 2016), Georg Vrachliotis (Arch+, 2016, DE).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (Afterword missing, 5 MB)